Critical Question 4

4. How did you integrate technologies – software, hardware and online – in this project?

Prezi presentation on how I integrated on supplies and their use in my project.

Critical Question 3

3. How did your production skills develop throughout this project?

CQ#1 and #3 were recorded the same day but posted on different days

Critical Question 2

2. How does your product engage with audiences and how would it be distributed as a real media text?

Prezi presentation

Critical Question 1

1. How does your product use or challenge conventions and how does it represent social groups or issues?

Contrast emphasizes self-confidence through its visuals. though I spent countless hours on this project I made sure to leave the editing on the picture of my models very minimal, which is completely inverse to what other beauty magazines like Vogue do. I want to depict all of my models' raw beauty mainly because my magazine is all about confidence in one's image. Thankfully, Contrast, being a small contained project, doesn't have the same media appeal as the aforementioned Vogue thus does not need to include heavy amount of makeup and editing on my models to be considered a consumer worthy product. Less involved with my topic but with the same idea in mind, I followed an eccentric format similar to RayGun's, I did not want to abide by the standard 3-4 columns of text. Another reason why I preferred this format, was simply because I'm accustomed to editing the Yearbook.Where we do not organize our text into rows, rather into patches of an image then a caption.

Final edits for Cambridge- 4 page magazine

In the end, It was hard sticking to only the required cover, table of contents, and a two-page feature.  Mainly because I feel so incomplete, for that reason I am including two versions of the final product; this version and an eight-page long version with the rest of the articles. Since I prioritized the completion of my Cambridge media product, I will be including the final touches and writing process of those pages as my last few post.

Below is my finalized product

Final Cover layout

To make It more professional looking I masked out the background giving it that blank background that draws the eye directly to the model. At first, I had created this very chunky, childish-looking outline. In order to make sure that my cover lines stuff out but in the next snapshot, you will see that I not only played around with their organization but I fixed the outline issue. Afterward, I also added a layer filter to increase the contrast on background elements to create this final image.

Creating the my Cover Image

Due to many exceptions and compromises, I've had to make a few revisions to my original design. Photoshoots and didn't go as smoothly as I planned due to many time limitations. I had to change My featured article from Love, You to my Body Identity article, and combined the two focuses: Getting to know Kyra and informing the reader about the transgender struggle. Another significant change was the new Masthead, only the text will be the same.

 The assets I used to create the embellishments to the sides were reused from an earlier project for my school's yearbook. They are paint strokes I made into PNG transparent and recolored with layer filters. I stretched and warped them to make this lovely pillar frame. The font used for my masthead is Elephant which came with my photoshop, the other fonts are tweaked versions of Freestyle script which is a freeware font I got from Dafont.com. I created the interesting "Contrast" font by rasterizing the font then creating various layer masks which I then filled with the background color.

The masthead is now in a font called Elephant Italic, this font came default with my photoshop. From an artistic perspective, It looks on par with the font of  Vogue. As for my cover-lines, some are attention-grabbers like "What is beauty?" which is a line that belongs to my "Love, You" article, and the use of "more" in all capitals to make it look enticing. At the top, I included the same tagline from before along with the volume and publication date. Towards the end, I created the "equal representation" line because I figured that I should include a text that introduces the theme of the articles.